1. Field of the Invetion
The present invention relates to a care bed for communication between a patient and nursing staff or service personnel.
2. The Prior Art
The invention mainly relates to communication between a patient who, due to illness is dependent on regular care, and the nursing staff which manages this task. When their mobility is reduced, such patients may have to stay in a hospital or care bed or another article of furniture, e.g., a chair or a wheel chair, for a long period of time. The term communication is used to not only refer to direct oral communication between a patient and a nursing attendant, but also to include the exchange of data describing a patient's needs and data describing the state of both the patient and the article of care furniture.
Hospital systems for communication between a patient and the nursing staff are known. In the most simple embodiment, it is a switch which can be activated by the patient as an emergency call or when assistance is required. More sophisticated systems are known where a number of parameters concerning the state of the patient and the hospital bed are continuously transferred to a central monitoring. In most cases it is a wired connection with a plug connection between the bed and a wired network connection from the central monitoring to the room in which the patient is located. However, systems are known like, e.g., US 2008/205311 A1 to Perkins et al., where the interface between the bed and the network over a short range has been replaced by a wireless connection.
As another example of a communications system, a hospital system as known from US 2003/0163535 A1 may be mentioned, which relates to a communications system where the patient by operating a switch can send preselected e-mail messages to relatives in that this function is supported by the central monitoring system.
In a hospital with limited geographical dispersal, such a monitoring system is practical as it is relatively simple to connect the beds to a central network via cables or short-range wireless networks.
For patients living in sheltered accommodations or in their own homes, such a system is difficult to use, as it would result in a large amount of wiring and installation and typically require a connection to the central monitoring with a modem via a telephone connection. The problem is further complicated by the fact that the patient over periods can change between being placed in a care bed, a chair or a wheel chair, which cannot readily be connected to a wired network. Therefore, the communication between a patient and the nursing staff is often limited to regular phone calls, where the patient is in contact with the nursing staff or a central switch board. Further, it is to be expected that the nursing staff travels over a large geographical area between the patients, for which reason wired telephone connections for contact with the patients are difficult to use. Another factor is that the nursing staff as far as possible should be spared telephone calls, so that they can focus on the ongoing nursing task instead. Normally a scheduled route is followed between the patients to minimize the commuting time and thus both the expenses for hourly wages and the expenses for running the utilized vehicles. Some conditions would, however, require that the nursing staff will have to prioritize the patient and change the scheduled route, e.g., if a non-mobile patient leaves the article of care furniture or if an accident has occurred, where the patient has contaminated the article of care furniture with body fluids. On ethical and health grounds, mainly to avoid bedsores, it would be required that the nursing staff as soon as possible pays the patient a visit.
The purpose of the invention is to provide an alternative solution to the personal telephone contact between a patient in a sheltered accommodation or his own home and the nursing staff when the patient requires attendance, where the patient in an easy and secure manner can call the mobile nursing staff for assistance without interrupting them for long periods of time during their ongoing nursing tasks but still makes it possible to change the visiting route and thus prioritize the patient.